What do VMware and Salesforce.com have in common?

By Cameron Sturdevant |
Posted 2011-08-31

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HTML 5. This week at VMworld in Las Vegas and Dreamforce in San Francisco, both companies pushed HTML 5 as a "write once, deliver everywhere" mechanism. IT managers who are hearing about the "consumerization of IT" might use this time to ask, "how much longer can IE 6 be the corporate standard web browser?"The answer might be influenced by the platform. On a traditional desktop, used by one person, processing routine work using Microsoft desktop installed tools, the answer might just be, "IE 6 will be around until the building is torn down."

For mobile workers and workers for whom social collaboration is the norm, the answer is "IE 6 isn't supported today."

It's not insignificant that 20,000 attendees at VMworld and that many or more at Dreamforce embraced the message of HTML 5.

If I may characterize in very broad strokes, the VMworld audience was composed of "the face of IT" as we like to say at eWEEK. In the trenches, operations people and their managers. The Dreamforce audience is much more of a sales and marketing crowd, but still heavily tilted towards "the face of IT" that is prone to be a tablet-toting, cloud-sourcing, service customizing kind of person. That so many people from these two important areas of IT professionals nodded "yes" when the keynotes sounded the call for HTML 5 adoption, signals to me that the keynote is worth paying attention to.